The Year Without Pants

Scott Berkun was born and raised in Queens, New York City, studied philosophy, computer Science and design at Carnegie Mellon University, was a manager at Microsoft (1994-2003) where he led a team of over 100 developers and designers who built Internet Explorer up to version 5 when it still was the market leader.

From 2010 through 2012 he worked at WordPress.com and wrote The Year Without Pants which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the firm and the unique work culture that contributes to its phenomenal success. I listened to the audio book during my summer vacation in Italy and really loved it. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know how it feels to work inside or build a team of remote workers. Personally, I think it’s the future of work. Although being employed also has lots of benefits, the freedom you have when you can work from basically any place is an amazing quality of life I would never want to miss again being the founder of a remotely organized company myself.

50 million websites, or 20 percent of the entire web, use WordPress. The force behind WordPress.com is a convention-defying company called Automattic, Inc., whose ~300 employees work from anywhere in the world they wish and launch improvements to their products dozens of times a day. With a fraction of the resources of Google, Amazon, or Facebook, they have a similar impact on the future of the Internet.

Berkun’s story reveals insights on creativity, productivity, and leadership from the kind of workplace that might be in everyone’s future.